Peaceful Profits Podcast Ep. 3 - Knowing When to Hire
Synopsis:
Mike Shreeve reframes hiring with battle-tested guardrails instead of clichés. His core message: don’t hire until your business is boringly predictable—clear systems, stable inputs, and measurable lag metrics (e.g., X cold emails → Y calls → Z sales).
New hires always add short-term chaos: output dips, your workload spikes (training, QA, documentation), and focus fragments. To survive that dip, bank three months of the new hire’s salary in advance so you remove desperation pressure and give the relationship a fair runway. Then, come armed with captured systems—simple screen recordings, call replays, and working examples—so you can onboard by “job shadow at scale,” set objective standards, and diagnose issues (“is it our process or the person?”).
He closes by noting exceptions (net-new roles need even longer runways), mindset shifts (you must be willing to help hires succeed), and the alternative: sometimes you don’t need people—you need to redesign the business to reduce chaos. Practical, sober, and very Peaceful Profits.
Transcript:
Knowing When to Hire
[00:00:00] Hello, my dear friends. Hope you're doing well. Welcome to this episode of the Peaceful Profits Podcast. Today we're gonna. When to hire. Now, this is not a complete list of times in which you should hire, but I do want to give you a different perspective. And this is a perspective that has been learned rather than studied.
So when I first started growing my business, I knew eventually I was gonna have to hire somebody, and I went out and I did all the research, I listened to all the books, and did the whole thing that all business owners do. We try to [00:00:30] educate ourselves into a solution, and I'll tell you some of the advice that I've been given.
Hire when it hurts. Hire slow, fire fast hire for areas of weakness. All of the sort of typical generic advice. And I would say, most of it is decent advice, but it really lacks some contextual guideposts, which is to say, yeah, but what does it mean to hire when it hurts? What does it actually mean to, go through this advice and how can I apply it to my business [00:01:00] specifically in the moment that I am?
So what I wanna give you today are some signs, guideposts checkpoints for you to examine, to ask whether you're even ready to hire. Because I think there's a lot of expectations that if I hire, then all my problems are solved, and it's unicorns and rainbows, and I never have to work a day again, a day in my life ever again or whatever, whatever the thing might be.
And while that can be true, eventually, it's never true initially. Okay. And so we're gonna talk a little bit about that and I want you to have realistic expectations about hiring so that you can do it properly, and so that eventually you [00:01:30] can take those extended vacations, work yourself outta the day to day like I am.
I have a multi seven figure per year business. I don't do anything on the day to day. So if that didn't happen overnight, all right, so here we go. When to hire sign symptom guidepost Number one, do not hire in your business until your business is boring. Now, what do I mean by boring? The biggest shock that people have when they are hiring, whether it's, a lower level virtual assistant, or it's a critical member of [00:02:00] sales and marketing.
One other thing that always shocks people is how chaotic hiring someone can be. Now, what do I mean by chaotic? 'cause it's important to understand so you can watch for it. If I have a business. And I'm going along and I am doing a daily set of actions. I'm pulling the the Atomic Habits, James Clear style, and, I've really habitualize my performance and I'm very productive.
I know exactly what I need to do to get the exact right results that I'm looking for. And I'm in a system whether I know I'm in a [00:02:30] system or not, I'm going through specific actions, and that's my business. When you bring somebody in as a hire, there are a couple of things that are going to occur.
One, that person will not be as good as you at what you have been doing. Now, they may be better than you eventually. That's the hope of hiring someone is that over time they'll be able to bring their stuff in and that will contribute to a greater overall result. But in the beginning, that's not the case.
In the beginning, [00:03:00] they are really bad then, and it can be frustrating, but there are consequences to that person not having. The same skill level or not being able to produce the same results that you produce. Some of those are one, you start getting lower results. So for example, if you bring somebody into sales and marketing, you've been doing sales and marketing, and you bring somebody in, expect a drop in your sales and marketing results.
You, you have to realistically expect that if you are bringing somebody in [00:03:30] for fulfillment, get ready to experience a dip in fulfillment. Now again, hopefully these dips are only temporary, right? Hopefully they're only a few months at most. And what you're getting in return is that somebody will eventually be way better than you.
But if you expect someone to hop onto your team and within 24 hours be producing at your level or higher, you're dreaming, you are living in a fantasy world. And I'm not saying that to be [00:04:00] rude. I want to shake you from. Whatever guru has told you that's what's going to happen. Because what happens when your performance dips is your focus starts to break apart.
So you as the bonus, the business owner, now you're really gonna start feeling the chaos because now you need to focus on training the person. Which is taking your time off of other tasks. So those other tasks start to slip out of, through your fingers, your workload actually increases.
It doesn't decrease. It increases. 'cause [00:04:30] now you have to make sure that the fulfillment is still there. The sales and marketing is still there, but then you also have to work this person through the process. And if you've never taught someone how you're supposed to do your process, then now you have the added intellectual difficulty of.
Transferring the knowledge. How do I do? I've never had to transfer this knowledge before trying to figure that out. So you basically have taken on a host of new tasks by bringing someone on. And so many times people who've hired in the past they get in this cycle and they don't understand.
They think it must be them, like they're just bad at hiring [00:05:00] or they think, man, everybody, whoever works for other people must totally suck at everything because I've never done a, this is a normal process. Think about how bad you were at the things you do now when you first started. And now imagine having to go work for somebody else who doesn't really know how to train and manage you properly.
You've probably experienced that in the past, how frustrating and difficult that was for you to get results. So this is why I say your business needs to be boring before you bring in [00:05:30] other people. And when boring, very measured, measurable, and predictable. Systems and results. So systems and how you do things and results in what the lag metrics are.
So what do you mean by lag metrics? For example, you know that when you send out this many cold emails, you're gonna get this many phone calls. This many phone calls will turn into this many sales, which is, that's how many, that's how much in revenue you should be expecting. That's a boring business.
Boring businesses are peaceful businesses. They are beautiful businesses. They're wonderful businesses. They're [00:06:00] assets rather than a job when things are boring. When you bring in a human being, all that's gonna get messed up until you can recalibrate, until you can bring that person to that level until they understand the system, until they know what the expectations are and et cetera.
And if you start from that baseline of it's super boring, then when the chaos comes in, it's manageable. It's do. If you bring someone in and you're starting at chaos, meaning you don't have a system for knowing [00:06:30] how many cold emails to send, you don't know how many phone calls there are that will turn into sales.
You don't know what the expected revenues are, then what do you think is gonna happen? You bring someone in and everything just breaks. Because there was no baseline boring expectation. There was nothing to move towards if you're still in the figuring it out mode on something. As fundamental as sales and marketing, don't hire for sales and marketing unless you are at a point in your life where you can pull an Elon Musk and sleep under [00:07:00] the desk at PayPal.
There's a reason why companies that grow so quickly. Push their teams so hard because the only way to really deal with chaos is a straight time trade off. See systems and boringness gives you freedom. Chaos turns everything into a job, into something that needs to be held onto and something that needs to be, hours and hours into the process and da, and all that kinda good stuff.
So the first checkpoint in your business as to whether it's time to hire [00:07:30] is as if it's boring, if it's boring. Because boring should give you what is next. So if number one is a checkpoint, a guidepost, that your business has to be boring. Number two, I highly recommend highly recommend that you have at least three months of this new person's salary saved up before you hire them.
Now, why would we want that? So let's say you have a boring business, totally boring. And you go and you wanna [00:08:00] hire, let's say a marketing director or something like that. Some like real big awesome person that's gonna take everything over and you're so excited and they're $10,000 a month, right? And you're like, this is an A player, they're gonna get me great results.
And look, it doesn't matter if it's $10,000 a month or $500 a month, you're just trying to hire a va. The principal remains the same. But I wanna give you an extreme example here. $10,000 a month, you think you're bringing in this total a player. What did we just say? People add chaos. Okay. And you're deciding to bring somebody into a very critical to revenue generation point in your business.
So what's gonna happen? The, [00:08:30] whatever that was boring, whatever the results that you were getting before, they're gonna dip. So revenues are gonna go down. That is gonna happen when you very first start this process. Maybe it's only a couple weeks, maybe it's a couple months. By setting aside three months of salary for this person, you remove one of the biggest, I would say, hindrances to, what it would be collaborative growth, or, lemme see if I can put it in a, in, in, in English here. One of the reasons that relationships don't work out when you're hiring is because of the stress [00:09:00] that you experience when you have to bring someone on, which is an added expense to your business, and then everything starts to get chaotic.
So now you are coming to the table and there's this person that you've brought into your world and you are hanging over their head I'm paying you this and you need to get me results. And I took on an extra expense and da, it starts to cloud it. Ability to actually get from this person what you need to get [00:09:30] from this person, what you need.
There's a guy that I like to listen to. His name is Joel Saladin and he is a farmer and he likes to help people start family farms and grow farms and my wife and I have listened to a lot of his and helped us to get set up our farm and do a bunch of stuff. He talks a lot about why a Type A personalities make really bad farmers, and it's because type A personalities want to force biological situations.
In other words, a tree takes as long as it takes to grow. There's nothing you can do about it. In fact, if [00:10:00] you try to rush the process too much, you kill the tree. In working myself and I and this is not a point of pride this is more me sharing my B battle scars in building my own teams and in helping hundreds of other companies build their teams.
I have seen more often than not incredibly talented people come into a company and wilt, absolutely wilt under the pressure. That was created artificially by the business owner [00:10:30] taking on an expense, not being prepared for the momentary dip in result, and then hanging that expense over the head of the person that has come onto the team.
So my recommendation of having three months of salary saved up has almost nothing to do with the economics of that situation. It's not like you're going to magically, that money's gonna turn into something else. It's about giving you and the person you're bringing on three months [00:11:00] to sort stuff out without having to worry about where that money's coming from to pay them.
I know it sounds so simple. And keep in mind, I don't have experience at the Fortune 500 level, fortune 1000 level. I'm talking about scrappy entrepreneurs. This is advice for scrappy entrepreneurs, people who are making their first hires, people who are. Coming into a situation where maybe this is the first time you've ever hired a big marketer.
Maybe this is the first time you've ever offered a six figure salary. Maybe this is the first time you ever hired a virtual assistant. Again, I still recommend, even if the virtual assistant's only [00:11:30] $400 a month, I still recommend you put aside $1,200 so that for the first three months you can at the very least, take the pressure off of that additional salary.
That additional salary. Okay, so here's the very last thing. At least for this episode, again, I could probably give you a list of a hundred things to watch for, but I think these are the most important. So one, your business needs to be very boring. Number two, you need to have three months salary saved before you bring somebody on.
And it needs to be that specific salary. So not just random salary, but to that particular [00:12:00] person. Number three is you need to have all of your systems captured. You have all of your systems captured. Now, this is basically your business needs to be boring, but I wanna point this out specifically because when you have your systems captured, it gives you.
The leverage you need to determine one of the hardest things to determine when hiring, which is it this person or is it me as to why things aren't working out? Lemme see if I can explain when, so what, first off, what is Capturing systems? Capturing Systems is, let's say for example, you've been answering your [00:12:30] customer support up to this point.
Literally pulling out a Screencast or Screencast Amatic, loom, whatever, and recording yourself, doing your customer service for two or three hours a day for a week or two. Yeah that's we don't need, manuals not in our business, okay? When you get to be too big for your britches and you have, 150 employees devote some time to people coming up with, 400 page employee manuals, which no one's gonna read anyways.
For us, for entrepreneurs, we just need to capture the system. [00:13:00] If you're running sales calls, you need to have recordings of your sales calls. If you do cold outreach emails, you need to record yourself doing cold outreach emails. How you fulfill and run your Facebook ads. You need to capture it. Just, it's as easy as getting a, I dunno, what is $5 a month, screencast, amatic, and just creating a library.
You don't have to worry about how is it presented and does it have the proper structure? Just literally what you're trying to do is create a scalable system for someone to job shadow you. Because if you record yourself, look if all we do is we talk and type in this industry, right?
We talk to our [00:13:30] clients. We type to our clients. That's what we do for a living. You can record your talking on Zoom. You can record your typing on Screencast thematic, okay? That's job shadowing. They don't need to be in an office. You can do this anywhere around the world. They can see exactly what you do, having those systems captured, okay?
It doesn't mean you don't answer questions, right? When you bring someone on, it doesn't mean that you say, okay, there's the library of video recordings. You better go listen to 'em all. And if you don't have it figured out you're gone. But it does mean that you have covered your bases. And what do I mean by that?[00:14:00]
If you have captured systems and the person you hire cannot perform to the level of your captured systems, then you know it's the person, not you. And if you've never hired anyone, you probably don't understand the significance of having that clarity. If you have hired people before, then, laying in bed at night thinking, is this person failing because of me?
Am I not giving [00:14:30] them the training and the guidance and the information that they need to be effective or is it them? And when you don't know the answer to that, when you aren't convinced yourself of that answer, it can make very difficult the situation where you have to start making tough decisions like you can't work with me anymore.
Or I'm going to invest a bunch of money in training you because clearly, so it's a matter of having the baseline of systems captured is literally an asset you can use to get clarity in what the status of the working relationship is. [00:15:00] You can say what we do have the standard. We do ha, we do know how to do this here in this company because we're already doing it.
See, watch me do it. If you can't get that. If you cannot come away from watching that with an understanding of what you should be doing, then you are not qualified for this job. I'll give you an example. In my business, we do a lot of funnel stuff, right? So we're doing a lot of copy, we're doing a lot of [00:15:30] creating sales pages and things like that.
We have all of our funnels captured, every single funnel that has ever worked in my business. You can go look at. Exactly what, it's every meeting that I've had to help somebody come up with an offer, all those calls are recorded. I even have videos of me going over the offers, specifically why we came up with them, et cetera.
Probably hundreds of hours worth of calls and all kinds of good stuff from years past. And now the team is taking these calls and so those are recorded. If I hire a copywriter [00:16:00] to come into my business. And they have access to all these systems, captured systems, which is to say this is what an order page looks like in our business.
That works, okay? It's a captured system. It's a document, which is a screen capture. If a copywriter can't look at that and know how to implement copy for one of our clients, that copywriter is not qualified to be on our team because the standard has already been established. This is why I recommend that you don't hire until your company [00:16:30] is boring.
Don't hire until your company is boring. Now, you may say what about hiring people for stuff that we've never done before? What about hiring people for stuff that we've never done before? All of this is true because the person who's coming into a business for something that you've never done before, they still need all of this stuff.
They still need your company to be boring. The worst thing you can do is bring somebody in to do something new when the rest of your company is a hot mess. Also. There's too many inputs. There's too many variables. There's too many things that can [00:17:00] take this person who's having to not just work for you, but create new stuff in your business and them having to be connected to chaos.
You, you guys are gonna fail. Unless the person is just willing to do 90 hours a week for you. Trying to manage that much chaos. The chaos of new plus, the chaos of an existing business that isn't boring it, it's just not gonna work. You need to have captured your systems because the person coming in needs to see what have you been doing?
What is working? Even if it's an HR [00:17:30] person, having the captured system says, here's how our company works. They can see how you approach things. They can understand how it all works together. They can see how you've been training people in the past, et cetera. And then of course, look, honestly, if you're bringing somebody into your company for something that you've never done before, forget three months of salary saved.
I'd recommend six. Because if somebody has to come in, invent something new and work for you, the longer the runway you can give them, the more likely the result is that you're going to actually achieve what you're trying to achieve. [00:18:00] So this is probably not the advice that you've gotten in the past. This is advice from front.
Doing this thing on the front lines. And to be frank, being really bad at it, hiring people is not something that came second nature to me. I had all sorts of mental hangups around it because I was, or I guess more accurately, I still am the son of a blue collar worker who was in manufacturing in the nineties every six months from the time I was born until [00:18:30] I was 18 months, or sorry, 18 years old from the time I was born.
So I was 18 years old. We moved on average once every six months. Because my dad was always getting laid off from stuff that was getting shipped overseas. So when I started my business, I had all kinds of weird ideas in my head about what it meant to be a boss who hired people. You can imagine, right?
I hated bosses. I hated the guys in the suits I hated, I had a lot of stuff in there about that. So what I've learned over time is what it actually means to hire, how serious [00:19:00] hiring is not something to be taken lightly. And what you can do to better protect and preserve, therefore, increasing the likelihood of success by protecting and serving and preserving the relationship with these people that you have coming in Too often we expect people to come save our business when we ourselves are unwilling to do so bringing someone on board. There's a really, there, there's a sort of sentiment that I prefer when thinking about hiring, and it is, [00:19:30] I will hire someone if I'm willing to help them succeed. If I'm not willing to help this person succeed, one, it means they're not a good fit. If I'm not excited about helping you to be something better, it doesn't mean me specifically, if I'm not willing.
So our team right now, we have about. 23 people on our team, 24, 23 people on our team right now. I don't have to be the one actually sitting down with the person and, wa walking them through the stuff. Not at this point in our business. But if I'm not willing to devote company resources, if I'm not willing to devote other members of the team, if I'm not willing [00:20:00] to create trainings or do things like that then we, that's a sign that this person shouldn't be on the team because we can't just bring people on and not expect to help them.
Help us. Otherwise don't waste the money. Don't waste the time. Don't invite the chaos. Don't set yourself up for disappointment. So anyways, some tips there for you. When to hire, some things to look for. Again, we could go down a much, much longer list but I think hopefully this unlocks some thoughts, some [00:20:30] ideas for you in your own process of growing and hiring.
If you would like us to help you with building a team, working yourself outta the day today. Getting yourself to a point where, like my business, you have not just maintenance, right? So not just a boring business, but a business that innovates without you. So have a team, having a team that comes up with offers and solutions and fulfillment ideas and revenue ideas and really a business that functions without you.
If [00:21:00] your ego can handle that. And that's a little side joke there. For those of you who are in this process, there is a lot of. Mindset work that is required. There's a lot of systems work that's required. There's a lot of learning to let go and letting big things happen. There's a lot about selecting the right people.
How do you filter for those people? How do you find precisely the right person you need for precisely the right things? Sometimes we hire good people for the wrong reasons. Oftentimes we hire the wrong people for good reasons. How do you navigate that whole world? If you'd [00:21:30] like any help with any of that done with you, done for you, et cetera, don't hesitate to go to peaceful profits.com/call.
Have a chat with my amazing team of incredible people and we'll even give you some insights as to whether or not it's time for you to hire. If you just wanna ask somebody, Hey, here's my situation, is it time to hire? Give us a call. If it is time and we really do think it is, we can give you some solutions that we can do to help you If you're ready to.
Even this, let's say that all this sounds wonderful to you to be able to work yourself outta your business, but you're stuck in a chaotic business. Give us a call. [00:22:00] Helping people to get their business to be quite boring is something we're very good at. It has to do with the systems that you've chosen to implement the offers the way that you market.
A lot of people think that what they need to do is hire. Sometimes what they need to do is redesign their business. And they can maintain bigger, healthier, more consistent profit margins for significantly less work because the chaos itself has been reduced. So it's not always about hiring someone.
Sometimes it's about changing the very core nature and design of your business. Hard to tell you whether that's the case [00:22:30] or not. If you don't give us a call, peacefulprofits.com/call. We would love to chat with you, see what kind of stuff we can do together to help you see what help you need specifically.
Again, that's peacefulprofits.com/call. I hope that you enjoyed this podcast. We'll see you the next one.